14 · The Valley of Wet Ash

on its own. The governor looked at the map and understood that the margin noted was hours.

He sent Lina to ring the bells.

She ran to the tower. She took the steps two at a time and pulled the rope until the skin lifted between her fingers. The first stroke sounded like a mistake. At the fifth, women came out with children in their arms. At the eleventh, the plough apprentice appeared with a rope and went to get animals out of the pens.

The soldiers tried to stop the alarm. Oren planted himself in the tower doorway with the spear he almost never held properly. He could not have beaten them. Behind him came the baker, Arven, Arven's daughter and twelve neighbours unwilling to abandon the man who had just warned them.

The scribe called them fools. He had no order to kill and feared having to explain it. He backed towards the road and left two men watching the mill.

The water came before noon. It did

not come as a wall: it appeared behind fences, filled the channels backwards, began entering cellars. An old man refused to leave his dead wife's bed. Lina took his blanket and promised they would bring it later. She lied with such conviction that he followed her.

When she tried to return for the blanket, the water had already knocked down a wall.

In the mill, the guards were searching for what the courier had brought. They did not know Teren had taken it. They tore sacks and lifted boards. The flame began near the tool oil. Lina could never say whether one of them started it or a lamp fell during the struggle.

She could say that her father was still inside.

She crawled in through the pantry. She found him unconscious beside a fallen table. He weighed no more than the old man with the blanket, she told herself. No more than two sacks. Her body did not believe her, but she managed to drag him to the door.

A guard helped bring him out. The other had fled. Lina saw the blue insignia and struck his hands until he stepped away. Then she had to let him help again, because the miller had stopped breathing in a way that looked like breathing, and she did not know what to do.

The guard went back into the house for a pitcher. He did not come out. The roof fell onto the pantry.

In the days that followed, Lina did not want to be called brave. She wanted to understand how to thank someone she also had a right to hate.

A boy came without a horse, his soles tied to his feet with strips of shirt. He was from Lindvale. Teren recognised a burn scar he had cleaned himself.

“They opened the Ash Dam,” he said. “Water came through the fields. Then soldiers arrived to collect those with a mark.”

The cleric gave him water and waited until he could go on.

“Oren refused. They burned the mill.”

Teren

thought of Lina under the table.

They descended without stopping at the shelter. Beran's fever broke and returned twice. He did not complain until Ivara proposed leaving him with the shepherds.

“If I can't walk, tie me to the cart. Don't turn me into another object best hidden away.”

The valley smelled of wet ash. The flood had torn out fences and left trout among the squash. The water had not reached the square, but the fire had. A branch of the great cemetery oak was broken; the graves remained beneath it.

They found Oren in the church with his head bandaged. Sixteen wounded people lay beneath the tables. He did not ask them to leave. He stepped aside when Teren knelt beside the first.

Lina appeared at nightfall carrying a pitcher. Her hair had been cut with a knife because it caught fire as she pulled her father out.

“The wheel is whole,” she told the cleric. “It took the roof, and the stones cracked, but the wheel stayed.”

He wanted to embrace her. She put the pitcher in his hands.

“Fetch water. There are still plenty left.”

For two days they did not speak of seals.

The first night, a woman came into the hospice with two pots of water and news: the northern well smelled of a dead animal. It was the only one not buried beneath flood mud.

Teren wanted the wellhead closed. Oren asked what water he intended to wash wounds with. No one was arguing over whether the well was safe, only over how long they could wait without using it.

Lying beside the wall, Beran asked for a map of the valley. Lina drew it in charcoal on a board. The engineer pointed to a mill conduit that drew water upstream of the fields. It could be diverted to the courtyard if they cleared the channel and found enough vessels.

Lina looked at him as though he had just allowed her back into part of her home.

She went out with six neighbours.

Serik carried stones; Maera cleared a path through burned planks. Elyen went ahead to examine the spring. Birds were drinking, and there were tracks of animals that did not flee the smell. It was no guarantee of purity, but it let them choose where to fill the first pitchers.

Neris organised the children to report which containers could be used. They had to distinguish those that held oil from those that had contained dye. A girl proposed marking the good ones with flour. It hurt the gnome to see that little fall to the ground when they still did not know whether they could afford to eat it.

By dawn, water reached the church through an open channel. They had to boil it. Dry firewood was scarce. Oren allowed them to dismantle the benches in the council hall. They were oak and had served three governors.

A neighbour objected. Not because of the furniture's value, but because he knew they would later be asked to rebuild it without payment.

“We'll

record it,” Oren said. “And the next table needn't be so large.”

The plough apprentice appeared with boards on his shoulder. He had learned to brace them against his bandaged arm. He did not want to sit among the wounded again, and Teren lacked the strength to turn each attempt into a prohibition.

He gave him work he could do without opening his stitches.

The boy took time to accept it. At last he began cutting strips for bindings, awkwardly, with a hand less capable than he remembered. Lina worked beside him without explaining that he was brave. The cleric thanked her in silence. They washed wounds, dug latrines and boiled the blankets they could rescue. Serik nailed boards beside men who had once greeted him as their protector. One spat at his feet. The paladin held the board until it was straight.

Maera sent a message south and another east. She did not promise they would arrive. Elyen opened a passage through the woods so carts would not cross

the soft ground. Neris, without an instrument, learned the detainees' names.

Teren found Oren in the mill's remains.

“If I'd stayed…”

The governor turned.

“Don't do that. Don't steal our right to have decided too. I received the order. I said no.”

He showed a burn on his palm.

“This is mine. You decide what you're going to do with yours.”